Templates WG SWOT

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis for the Templates Workgroup

December 12, 2013

What are the strengths of your workgroup?

• Small, congenial core membership
• Experiences around definition and use of templates for many years in international projects
• Knowledge of templates of various governance groups
• Implementation experiences using templates with various vendors
• Experience designing templates within various Standards Development Organizations
• Experience with various template design and management tools
• Good links and cross membership with SD and PC, CDS, Tooling

What are the weaknesses of your workgroup?

• Limited technical and administrative resources, leading to:
  • Difficulty in synchronizing different and sometimes conflicting requirements
  • Difficulty in meeting time requirements to coordinate among stakeholders and participate in governance groups

What opportunities do you see that can be addressed by your workgroup?

• Increased interest in templates, registries, repositories, versioning and interoperable template definitions and exchange
• Improve interoperability between CDA Templates and FHIR Profiles
• Extend template management and governance experience to incorporate best practices across work groups involved with designing, creating, and using templates and similar artifacts

What obstacles or threats to progress have you identified?

• Cost of participation in working group meetings and HL7 membership, especially as government funding is reduced
• Within HL7 a wide variety of options for expressing and defining templates exists
• Versioning applies to many artifacts and creates confusion when extrapolated to templates
• Underdeveloped change control / sustainability / managing change over time for templates (and other artifacts)

Further information about SWOT

A short introduction to S.W.O.T. can be found at [[1]]

Approval

The SWOT has been approved on Jan 20, 2014 at the WGM by the Templates Working Group